Links for Keyword: Language

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Think you have your hands full making sure your baby is fed and clean and gets enough sleep? Here's another thing for the list: developing your child's social skills by the way you talk.
People used to think that social skills were something kids were born with, not taught. But a growing body of research shows that the environment a child grows up in as an infant and toddler can have a major impact on how they interact with others as they get older. And it turns out that a key factor may be the type of language they hear around them, even at an age when all they can do is babble.
Psychologists at the University of York observed 40 mothers and their babies at 10, 12, 16 and 20 months and logged the kind of language mothers used during play. They were especially interested in "mind-related comments," which include inferences about what someone is thinking when a behavior or action happens.
Elizabeth Kirk, a lecturer at the university who is the lead author of the study, published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology on Monday, gave this as an example: If an infant has difficulty opening a door on a toy, the parent might comment that the child appears "frustrated."
Then researchers revisited the children when they were 5 or 6 years of age and assessed their socio-cognitive ability. The test involved reading a story and having the children answer comprehension questions that show whether they understood the social concept -- persuasion, joke, misunderstanding, white lies, lies, and so forth -- that was represented.

By Sarah C. P. Williams
Parrots, like the one in the video above, are masters of mimicry, able to repeat hundreds of unique sounds, including human phrases, with uncanny accuracy. Now, scientists say they have pinpointed the neurons that turn these birds into copycats. The discovery could not only illuminate the origins of bird-speak, but might shed light on how new areas of the brain arise during evolution.
Parrots, songbirds, and hummingbirds—which can all chirp different dialects, pick up new songs, and mimic sound—all have a “song nuclei” in their brain: a group of interconnected neurons that synchronizes singing and learning. But the exact boundaries of that region are fuzzy; some researchers define it as larger or smaller than others do, depending on what criteria they use to outline the area. And differences between the song nuclei of parrots—which can better imitate complex sounds—and other birds are hard to pinpoint.
Neurobiologist Erich Jarvis of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, was studying the activation of PVALB—a gene that had been previously found in songbirds—within the brains of parrots when he noticed something strange. Stained sections of deceased parrot brains revealed that the gene was turned on at distinct levels within two distinct areas of what he thought was the song nuclei of the birds’ brains. Sometimes, the gene was activated in a spherical central core of the nuclei. But other times, it was only active in an outer shell of cells surrounding that core.
When he and collaborators looked more closely, they found that the inner core and the outer shell—like the chocolate and surrounding candy shell of an M&M—varied in many more ways as well.

Jordan Gaines Lewis
Hodor hodor hodor. Hodor hodor? Hodor. Hodor-hodor. Hodor!
Oh, um, excuse me. Did you catch what I said?
Fans of the hit HBO show Game of Thrones, the fifth season of which premieres this Sunday, know what I’m referencing, anyway. Hodor is the brawny, simple-minded stableboy of the Stark family in Winterfell. His defining characteristic, of course, is that he only speaks a single word: “Hodor.”
But those who read the A Song of Ice and Fire book series by George R R Martin may know something that the TV fans don’t: his name isn’t actually Hodor. According to his great-grandmother Old Nan, his real name is Walder. “No one knew where ‘Hodor’ had come from,” she says, “but when he started saying it, they started calling him by it. It was the only word he had.”
Whether he intended it or not, Martin created a character who is a textbook example of someone with a neurological condition called expressive aphasia.
In 1861, French physician Paul Broca was introduced to a man named Louis-Victor Leborgne. While his comprehension and mental functioning remained relatively normal, Leborgne progressively lost the ability to produce meaningful speech over a period of 20 years. Like Hodor, the man was nicknamed Tan because he only spoke a single word: “Tan.”

Alice Park
We start to talk before we can read, so hearing words, and getting familiar with their sounds, is obviously a critical part of learning a language. But in order to read, and especially in order to read quickly, our brains have to “see” words as well.
At least that’s what Maximilian Riesenhuber, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University Medical Center, and his colleagues found in an intriguing brain-mapping study published in the Journal of Neuroscience. The scientists recruited a small group of college students to learn a set of 150 nonsense words, and they imaged their brains before and after the training.
Before they learned the words, their brains registered them as a jumble of symbols. But after they were trained to give them a meaning, the words looked more like familiar words they used every day, like car, cat or apple.
The difference in way the brain treated the words involved “seeing” them rather than sounding them out. The closest analogy would be for adults learning a foreign language based on a completely different alphabet system. Students would have to first learn the new alphabet, assigning sounds to each symbol, and in order to read, they would have to sound out each letter to put words together.
In a person’s native language, such reading occurs in an entirely different way.